On His White Horse Mescalito

The corporeal container monikered “Leonard Nimoy” has been vacated. But Mr. Spock, he lives on. For, as Robert Anton Wilson observed back in 1977, Mr. Spock, he is of an archetype that has occupied the human nervous system since the long days pre-monolith. And he will continue to occupy said nervous systems. Unto when humans move out into space. Moving there, in the great wide open, as they only and should: without bodies.

Wilson relates that he first spied Spock “one day after the end of a peyote trip, when I was weeding in the garden and a movement in the adjoining cornfield caught my eye. I looked over that way and saw a man with warty green skin and pointy ears, dancing.”

Unlike the rapid metaprogramming during a peyote trip, in which you are never sure what is “real” and what is just the metaprogrammer playing games, this experience had all the quality of waking reality, and differed only in intensity. The entity in the cornfield had been more beautiful, more charismatic, more divine that anything I could consciously imagine when using my literary talents to try to portray a deity.

As the mystics of all traditions say so aggravatingly, “Those who have seen, know.”

Wilson next relates that in reading the works of Carlos Castaneda he encountered again this green man. Wherein “Don Juan Matus, the shaman, said his name was Mescalito. He was the spirit of the peyote plant.”

But:

The greenish-skinned, pointy-eared man I saw in 1963 has appeared in the folklore of many cultures who do not even use peyote. He has been seen most frequently, in recent years, as a humanoid extraterrestrial in various flying saucer reports by alleged Contactees. And, in the late 1960s, he began to appear regularly on TV, known as “Mr. Spock” on the Star Trek show, and has remained on the tube ever since, despite frequent network attempts to cancel the show and get rid of him. The fans always insist on bringing him back, and now in 1977, as I write, “Mr. Spock” is scheduled to appear either in the first Star Trek movie or a revival of the series on TV. He is an image, or as Jung would say, an “archetype,” that cannot be erased from the human mind.